An urgent wake-up call, from one who knows whereof he speaks.

Armando Christian Pérez, the renowned Grammy-winning rapper known as Pitbull, spoke out about the abuse of power in COVID-19 lockdowns. Pitbull, a first-generation Cuban American whose family escaped from Fidel Castro’s communism, claimed that Castro would be jealous of the power Democratic officials have exercised during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“My family comes from communism, they fled communism, they had everything taken away from them, everybody got murdered, everybody got killed,” Pitbull said in a video on RevoltTV. “That’s the reason me, being a first-generation Cuban American, I look at freedom and I appreciate that s***. I appreciate opportunity…That comes from the fact that when Castro took over everything, and I’m looking at what’s going here right now.”

“The only person that’s hot…is Castro,” Pitbull added. “He’s going, ‘Y’all did it with a virus? Sh**. Y’all took over the world with a virus? You’ve got to be kidding me.’”

Pitbull noted that Castro “had missiles pointed to the United States of America” but he suggested that the COVID-19 lockdowns have done more damage to America than Russia did in the Cold War.

The rapper warned about Big Tech censorship, likening it to communism. “If anybody is not a part of the narrative we gonna take it off online… which to me smells like…communism,” he said.

There’s a very good reason for that, as this courageous young liberty-lover knows all too well. A little Pitbull pedigree:

As Paul Sakka at The Blaze noted, Pitbull’s grandmother fought in the Cuban Revolution on Castro’s side only to realize that she had made a terrible mistake. Fearing the rumors about communist indoctrination camps for children, she sent her two daughters to the United States during Operation Peter Pan, a covert program that brought 14,000 Cuban children to the U.S. between 1960 and 1962. The U.S. government brought Pitbull’s mother and aunt to Florida, and Pitbull’s father would also land there after fleeing the Castro regime.

Pitbull has said he would never play a concert in Cuba so long as the communist Castros control the country. “I won’t perform in Cuba until there’s no more Castro and there’s a free Cuba,” he told The Guardian in 2011. “To me, Cuba’s the biggest prison in the world, and I would be very hypocritical were I to perform there. The people in Cuba, they know what I stand for, and there’s a lot of people in Cuba that stand for the same. But they can’t say it.”

Good for Pitbull for exercising his rapidly-vanishing right to speak out like this. Nobody fears and loathes Marxist tyranny like those who have experienced it firsthand and lived to tell the tale. Americans ignore the increasingly clamorous warning of communism’s survivors at their own dire peril.